Mangal Pandey was a sepoy, an Indian soldier in the army of the East India Company. A few weeks before the famous rebellion of May 1857, also known as the Indian mutiny, he attempted to start a rebellion of his own. He was hanged, and became a folk hero.

War

Impossible chums ... Mangal Pandey and Captain Gordon PR

The film opens in 1853, when Pandey and his British chum Captain Gordon are fighting the Afghans for some unspecified reason. It's a dramatic scene, but impossible. The first Anglo-Afghan war finished in 1842, Pandey did not join up until 1849, and his regiment – the 34th Bengal Native Infantry – did not see action in Afghanistan.

Technology

Gunning for it PR

The action moves to Calcutta in 1857, where the East India Company is determined to introduce its shiny new Enfield rifles. The rifle's cartridges have to have their ends bitten off before they can be used. This turns out to be one of the worst pieces of design in history. They are rumoured to be waterproofed with a mixture of cow and pig fat, making them equally offensive to Hindus, who revere the cow, and Muslims, who are forbidden to eat the pig. These rumours were indeed the spark for the 1857 uprising, though discontent in Pandey's regiment was mostly caused by one British officer's clumsy attempts to convert the sepoys to Christianity.

Economics

The East India Company forces Indian farmers to grow opium, which it smuggles into China. When the Chinese object, the company sends Indian sepoys to force them to accept the drug trade. "And they called this the free market," the voiceover adds bitterly in Hindi, just before Gordon repeats it in English, to make sure that nobody misses it. The coercion is accurate; it was not exactly Britain's finest hour. But the East India Company was a monopoly, not a free market, which is why Adam Smith, the 18th-century father of free-market economics, was one of its staunchest critics.

Romance

And now for our song-and-dance break PR

Pandey falls in love with Heera, a woman forced to work as a prostitute in a whites-only brothel. Legend has it the real Pandey was having an affair with a married woman, whom he had rescued when she tried to commit suicide by throwing herself into the Ganges. That's at least as good a story as the one the film invents. Still, the sidelight thrown on sex slavery is interesting and relevant, and Pandey and Heera get a couple of stunning dance sequences out of it. By this point, this historian is enjoying the film far too much to get huffy about an inexact liaison.

Military

One of the most pigheaded Brits, Colonel Mitchell, tries to force the sepoys to use the cartridges by aiming cannon at them. Pandey breaks ranks and stands in front of one cannon's mouth. The real Mitchell did order artillery to surround his sepoys at their parade ground, but only after they had looted the arsenal. Pandey could not have been present: Mitchell was in charge of the 19th regiment, not the 34th. And it all happened in the middle of the night, not under the blazing Bengali sun shown in the film. So the personnel, the order of events and the timing are all wrong. Oh well. The costumes are nice.

Violence

The end of the line PR

The company brings in the Rangoon Regiment to put down the uprising. When the ships arrive, Pandey rushes to the parade ground and opens fire on the Brits. In reality, Pandey's premature mutiny was prompted by the arrival of just 50 soldiers from Calcutta, when he was under the influence of opium and bhang. There's no evidence for the film's suggestion that it was difficult to find anyone prepared to hang him afterwards.

Verdict

The Rising is a terrific film: powerful, shocking, and gorgeous to look at. In terms of accuracy, though, it's patchy, and strongly influenced by a desire to rewrite history from the point of view of the 20th-century freedom struggle. This is 1857 the way it should have been, not the way it was.